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Comment by Isamu

5 hours ago

I wrote code on a DECSYSTEM-20, the C compiler was not officially supported. It had a 36-bit word and a 7-bit byte. Yep, when you packed bytes into a word there were bits left over.

And I was tasked with reading a tape with binary data in 8-bit format. Hilarity ensued.

That is so strange. If it were 9-bit bytes, that would make sense: 8bits+parity. Then a word is just 32bits+4 parity.